Behind the scenes of drone food delivery in Finland

Summary

Finland’s weather is notoriously unfriendly; but even so, your food order might be delivered by a drone. On a rainy day after Helsinki’s annual Slush conference, Finnish entrepreneur Ville Leppälä took TechCrunch behind the scenes of a three-party partnership between Irish drone delivery company Manna, DoorDash-owned food delivery platform Wolt, and his own startup, Huuva. Huuva, whose name means kitchen hood, raised a seed round led by General Catalyst in 2022 with the promise of bringing good food to the suburbs. While it branched out of its cloud kitchen origins, its business still relies heavily on delivery tech — now including drones. “If available, we’ll send your order with a drone.” That’s how Wolt has been notifying customers ordering from Huuva’s Niittari location in Espoo, which is part of the Helsinki metropolitan area, but which Leppälä sees as particularly well suited for this concept. While European suburbs aren’t as sprawling as those in the United States, people who work, study, and live in places like Espoo still lack the variety of options they can find in the capital. Huuva lets them order popular items from partner restaurant brands — and drones help those orders arrive faster, Leppälä said. Building upon Manna’s track record of completing more than 50,000 deliveries in Dublin, operations in Finland started quickly once the appropriate permits were secured. After a pilot phase from February, the drones have been fully operational for the last two months in Espoo, where they depart from a launchpad that’s shared with delivery-only grocery store Wolt Market. For the end users, this means that they can order different food styles from Huuva’s partner brands, and add some groceries, too — each drone can carry around 4.4 lb, and Manna can send two of them at once. Image Credits:TechCrunch This adds another layer of convenience, but also speed. Unlike drivers, drones won’t get stuck in traffic at lunch time. According to Leppälä, this is key to making...